Young Money in the NYC

Here's an article wondering if all the young people in New York City are quietly being subsidized by their parents to live there:

The first time it happens, you’re surprised. One day, your friend with the roommates and the wobbly employment and the busted phone — they buy an apartment. They tell you they’re moving, then they admit they’re buying, and suddenly you’re standing in the living room they own. It’s not that you’d never talked about money, if you count the years spent passing $17 back and forth on Venmo; it’s just that you thought you were on the same track. That when you said “broke,” you understood it to mean the same thing. It’s as if you were both paddling aimlessly in New York’s sea of downward mobility when your friend burst out of the water and stumbled onto the beach.

New York has always been stuffed with rich kids chasing the dream on Daddy’s dime. However, it didn’t always feel as if those were the only people who could live here — as if the whole city bent to the budgets of the secretly funded.

I'd always suspected as much when I lived in Williamsburg from 1998-2012 but even I'm a little surprised at how close I got it right in my first book, Williamsburg Rats:

    My first clue came when I was working in real estate. Some kid would apply for an apartment, and in looking at him I’d assume he was a homeless person. Then he’d produce a guarantor’s form for the rent and it turned out his father owned a bank, or Pennsylvania, and had more money than God. That happened pretty much every time I showed an apartment, and was the first time I began to think, “gee, maybe we’re not all in this together, maybe we’re not all living from paycheck to paycheck.” Maybe, I came to realize, it was just me. As a roommate from my first year in Williamsburg once said: “Everybody here likes to look poor, but nobody wants to be poor.” 

    I’d always written them off as coming from a small pool of rich kids that were anomalies; surely, we were all struggling to get it together and figure out what we wanted to do with their lives. Little did I know it was me who was the anomaly.